Presenters: Richann Watson, Louise Hadden
SAS functions act as subroutines, combining arguments, operations and optional parameters, and they return a value as a result. These values can be either numeric or characters and can be used to create variables in expressions, via the DATA step, WHERE statements, the SAS macro language, within PROC REPORT and in PROC SQL.
CALL routines are very similar to SAS functions, sometimes sharing the same name and providing the same or similar functionality. CALL routines, as the name implies, begin with CALL statements, with the routine name appearing after “CALL”, followed by parenthetical arguments. As with SAS functions, the number of required and optional arguments vary.
Functions and CALL routines fall into specific categories, including character and string-matching functions and CALL routines and mathematical functions. Our favorite functions, PRXMATCH and PRXCHANGE, CATT and CATX and mathematical functions, fall into these two broad categories. We will provide descriptions of our favorite functions, guidance on how to use these functions and individual business use examples.
